March 2016

The 2016 Renovation Expo is coming to the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center next weekend, April 8-10, 2016. Make plans now to attend this premier event which will feature more than 200 exhibits designed to give you ideas and help with decorating and transforming your home, both inside and out, allowing you to reimagine, redesign and remodel your home.

Formerly named the Spokane Premier Home Improvement Show, this year marks the 17th annual event put on by the Spokane Home Builders Association. At this year’s Renovation Expo, you will discover great new ideas perfect for each room in your home and every lifestyle. The 2016 Renovation Expo is an excellent resource available to homeowners located in Spokane and the Inland Northwest area to be able to find a contractor that can best help with their upcoming home improvement projects for 2016.

The Renovation Expo is focused on helping you by offering ideas, inspirations and solutions for all of your home improvement needs. Some of the many products and services featured at the event that can help you with projects for your home include ceramic tile, kitchen and bath, windows and doors, HVAC, flooring, window coverings and blinds, decks and patios, roofing, landscaping, security systems, fireplaces, and closets, just to name a few.

The 2016 Renovation Expo takes place on Friday, April 8th from 12pm to 7pm, Saturday, April 9th from 10am to 7pm, and Sunday, April 10th from 10am to 5pm. The Expo is held at the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center located at 404 North Havana Street in Spokane Valley, Washington. Cost of admission is $8.00 for adults, while kids age 12 and under are admitted free. Parking is always free each day of the Renovation Expo.

As you attend the show, imagine how wonderful it would be to take all of these great ideas and use them in your newly built dream home by True Built Home! If you are not yet a homeowner, or are planning a move or would like to upgrade from your existing living space, consider having us design and build the home of your dreams, which you can decorate and incorporate ideas you get from the 2016 Renovation Expo. Call us today at (509) 255-3939 or visit our website: http://truebuilthome.com/.

This weekend from 10am to 3pm, the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium is holding Ocean Commotion, a chance for kids to go on an educational adventure through the sea! More information on this fun event is available at: http://www.pdza.org/calendar?cid=375. At True Built Home, we understand that families often have complex needs, and we work with you to help build the perfect home for your situation. Visit us for more information at: http://truebuilthome.com/.

As new prospective homeowners or current homeowners seeking to move are looking for a new home, many no doubt are considering buying a newly constructed home as opposed to an existing resale home. While they may have concerns about price and other factors in having a new home built, the reality is that compared to what may have previously been considered as a luxury only available for the wealthy, today’s new construction homes have opened the market to all ranges in price and styles including many attractive options in single family homes.

There are many benefits to purchasing a new construction home, some of which include the ability to personalize the home according to your lifestyle, meeting new neighbors as the community is built, and significant savings in utility bills with today’s new homes being constructed to a higher standard of energy efficiency with green building techniques. Joshua Ferris has listed seven advantages of buying a newly built home compared to resale homes, which are summarized below.

A new construction home is really your house from the beginning. An existing resale home is one that another family crafted to fit with their lifestyle. When you have a new home built you have many choices allowing you to customize the home to your own style and needs.

Your neighbors are also new as well. Often a new construction home will be built in a community of new homes, which allows you to meet the new neighbors who are also wanting to meet people and be part of the new community.

Recently built homes tend to be more attractive to home buyers if you sell the home later. As much as you love your new home, at some point you may need to relocate or other life situations might arise causing you to need to sell your home. Your newer home is likely to compare well versus older homes that may need renovation or bringing up to date to meet the needs of the modern homeowner.

You are able to choose the location of your new home. Resale homes are of course tied to their existing location. New building contractors often offer a range of floor plans from which to choose and you can typically have the home built on a lot that you choose in the areas where the contractor builds.

In today’s market, new construction homes often are a more cost effective investment than resale homes. Many existing homeowners have out of necessity priced their homes higher due to the fact that they are underwater in their mortgage, owing more on the loan than their home is worth so they can’t afford to reduce the price.

Older homes were built for lifestyles of families in that era, but the modern lifestyle is so much different even compared to a decade ago. Newly built homes typically feature modern amenities as standard offerings which are more attractive to today’s homeowner.

New construction homes help to save the owner money with energy efficient green building methods. These features frequently are too costly when retrofitting an existing home if it was not originally built to modern green building standards.

True Built Home is a leading on your lot home builder in Washington. With offices in Tacoma, Tri-Cities and Spokane, True Built Home has been successfully helping families create their dream homes across the Pacific Northwest. Visit our site for more information: http://truebuilthome.com/.

When comparing home builders side by side, it can really be tough for you the buyer. Why? Because not all apples are built the same.

As an illustration, consider if you were buying a new car. Sure, it comes with wheels, engine and transmission. However, if it was say an automatic transmission instead of manual, leather seats instead of cloth, nice rims instead of hub caps, it becomes apparently clear that you are buying a nicer vehicle than the plain-jane. However, you should expect or demand that the cheaper car should also be priced cheaper right? If then you bought the cheaper car, but paid the same price as the nicer car then yahoo for the dealer, but shame on the consumer for not doing their homework.

It’s similar with our homes compared to others. For instance, I have shouted this from the roof tops, but it’s so important that I am going to stress it in another way. I am going to compare a top-selling floor plan by one of our major competitors to our top-selling home just to show you how much more money you are wasting by ordering my competitors house and THEN, explaining why we can build for less money with more quality features than builder “X”. After which if you choose to literally “throw your money away”, it’s on you.

Being discreet I will simply say one our largest competitor sells a home that is 2576 sqft, 2 car garage 2 bath in Washington for $158,900 or roughly 61.68 psf. We’ll compare that home to our best seller the Juniper Ridge which is 2527 sqft with two car garage 2.5 bath for $155,900 or 61.69 psf. nearly the same square footage price right? So you would think it should have pretty much the same features, correct? It’s important to compare apples to apples so you the consumer can have a clearer idea of what you are getting in your home or what you may want to add to get a nicer home. I am going to point out only where glaring differences exist. For starters let’s go to the foundation because, you should have noted that you already get an extra bathroom with our TBH house (about $3500);

Foundation – They have a 22’’ foundation, True Built Home (TBH) offers a 24’’ foundation. Why shorter? Obviously to save money. In addition, they do a hung joist floor where we do a rim joist floor. That essentially cost the builder more but the reason being is we need that extra space because we often run all the HVAC plenum under the house, but the real benefit is almost all clients want access to the crawl space for future use. They do not offer the electric furnace package standard, their standard heat source are wall units. So, between the two items mentioned here, you are looking at about a 10k dollar upgrade. Get out your wallet.

Next; their garage space is 22×22, where ours is 22×24 or 44 more sqft. To add 44 more sqft to their garage you’ll likely be charged 1600 dollars. Oh BTW, your TBH home will come with a freezer jack, and 2 outlets in the garage and a plug-in the ceiling because we do a garage door opener standard (we mention later in this article) – put your hands up with our competitor because they are going to charge you another $500-600 dollars for those items.

Fascia board – If you look at their product, they attach the gutters right to the truss tails. However, a True Built Home comes with fascia board. The cost to add to our competitor’s house add $700-800, and the peace of mind that the truss tails won’t rot! As you look up under the overhang of the roof, with their home you will see oriented strain board or better known as OSB. While this is a great product and we use it too on our homes, we don’t use it for the overhang of the roof. There is a debate on whether or not to allow this to be exposed to the constant weather. Builder “X” will tell you that the paint you put on it will be just fine, however, it still is unsightly and will it hold up under Washington mood swings with our rain and sun?? TBH only installs CDX plywood. It’s smooth, can be painted and durable. It looks great and last for years when used properly. If they offer it, you might pay as much as $500-600 extra dollars for this True Built Home standard feature.

Let’s move inside where the costs are really going to go up.

Carpet pad – We do an 8lb pad, they list “carpet pad” as their standard and one would only guess that it’s a 6lb because if it were 8lb, they would mention it. Upgrade cost-around $700 dollars

Our hemlock solid wood trim stained to match your cabinets is by far a step up from what our competitor offers. Their standard trim is an embossed (plastic) coated finger jointed wood trim. Obviously much less expensive and it shows but the real problem is when you damage it. You see, because it’s embossed you can repair it to make it look right again. With a true wood trim, when it gets nicked or damaged it’s an easy fix. Do you desire that TBH standard? It will cost you about $1800.

If you get rid of the cheap trim, you’ll have to upgrade their door package because they are an embossed flat photo finish door to match the plastic coated trim. When will it stop, right? Add roughly $2000 dollars because our interior doors come painted as well! We offer 5 different whites as standard. However, if you have a different color in mind, we charge a bit more outside of our standard white.

All of our cabinets come standard as a 36’’. Add $800 dollars for that change. Are you yelling for mercy yet?

Back to the garage – We include the opener. However, if you are their client you may want to open it on a rainy day, right! Add $400-550 dollars. We use only Moen faucets throughout all of our branches-Not sure what they use, they don’t list it but if they don’t you could be looking at around $900-1100 dollars to have installed a nationally recognized and award-winning faucet. We offer both the Brantford and the Eva standard in chrome. Satin and ORB are an upgrade. Keep in mind the deep kitchen sink and we hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised by our faucet as well.

We really could mention more like HD Formica counter tops, a better selection of standard vinyl and carpet, door hardware, bathroom hardware; all of which are upgrades by others. So, if you walked into builder “X and wanted the “Standard” True Built Home, how much more would you have to spend? Sit down. You would spend north of twenty-two thousand dollars, that’s right $22,450 dollars, and we are being conservative!

So, you should be asking yourself why and how. Why do they do that, and how can TBH offer more for less? The big secret is they are franchises. Yep, they have to pay the mother corporation for each home sold and they make the majority of their money on upgrades, and you pay out the nose to make their business model work. True Built Home is owned by only one person; not like a franchise and not like another competitor of ours which is owned by three families. When compared to them as well, you end up funding their checking and saving account, not yours.

So the question we want to ask is when a company offers a product but does not list the items that go into the home… why not? The other is, if a company does not list the price of their homes, why not? When you the buyers are kept in the dark from the start, how might you be treated during the process and at the end of the process?

Our standard home, is our competitors upgraded home.

Obviously it’s your money and you can spend it how you like, but nearly $23K is a LOT of lattes and movies. Or, as we stated at the front of this article, a car with leather seats, nice rims and an automatic transmission!

Don’t miss out on this exclusive offer from True Built Home and Crane Financial Group for a No Charge Mortgage Credit Attainment Consultation with a Certified FICO Professional! This $187 value, courtesy of Veritas Credit, won’t last forever; sign up now! http://tbh.myloancredit.com/. At True Built Home, we know that building a home is a big investment, which is why we strive to make it as affordable as possible: http://truebuilthome.com/.